Exposed by Jasinda Wilder

  You smirk. "Ah. He told his side of the story, did he?"

  "His side?"

  A nod. "There are two to every story, aren't there?" You swagger to me. Sit in the chair opposite mine, nearly empty water bottle in hand. "He went into the situation eyes open, Isabel. He knew exactly what he was getting himself into, but wasn't smart enough to not get caught."

  "So what he told me is true."

  "Oh yes. Very much so. He was a pawn. I used him, kept him disposable, and let him take the fall when the SEC came knocking. I was grooming him for it the entire time, keeping him isolated, keeping him flush with cash, making sure he had the requisite skills to do what I needed. And he did. So I made use of him. Lured him in, hook, line, and sinker. And then, yes, I intentionally set him up to take his share of the blame when things went bust, as I always knew they would. And really, I didn't set him up. I just made sure he was out in the open and I wasn't. I didn't accuse him of or frame him for anything he didn't do. If you're going to commit a crime, you have to plan on getting caught, and have a plan for getting away when you do. Your boyfriend was a sucker, Isabel. And if you're expecting an apology or an explanation for that, or for any of the many ways I've made my fortune . . . well, don't hold your breath. I will not apologize to anyone, not for anything."

  "I would never expect an apology from you, Caleb."

  "You know me better than that, obviously."

  "No one knows you, Caleb."

  You finish your water and crumple the bottle into a ball, twisting on the cap. "Not true. You know me. Better than anyone, I think."

  "Which is saying something, because you are a complete mystery to me."

  You merely breathe and stare at me for a while, and I merely breathe and stare back. I set my scotch down. I've had enough. I'll need my wits about me for this, something tells me.

  The silence extends. The history between you and Logan is irrelevant, really. It doesn't concern me, or the crux of my problems. It's rather underwhelming, actually.

  "What do you want, Isabel?" you ask, eventually.

  "I don't know," I say, truthfully. "I wish I did."

  I hand you my glass of scotch, but keep the cigar. It's something to do with my hands, something to distract myself from your beauty. You take the tumbler and swirl the amber contents, toss back a sip. I watch your Adam's apple bob as you swallow.

  Your eyes pin me. "You do know, you're just afraid to say it to me."

  Damn you for being right. "I want my freedom. I want to be . . . a real person. I want to love and be loved. I want a future." I swallow hard against the hot stone of emotion searing my throat. "I want my past back. I want . . . I want to not need you. To not be addicted to you."

  "I will give you anything you ask me for, Isabel. I have never kept you prisoner. I kept you isolated, it is true. Sequestered, perhaps. But it was for your own good. And also, truthfully, because I am selfish. I do not want to share you. Not with anyone. Not any part of you. I must, however, so I do. I do not like it, but I do."

  "So if I asked you to have the microchip in my hip removed, along with any other means of tracking my whereabouts, would you do it?"

  "Is that what you are asking me for?"

  "Are you a djinn, that I must phrase my requests with precision so as not to be tricked?"

  You smirk. "Yes, Isabel. I am a djinn. I've been meaning to tell you."

  Humor? Sarcasm? I really do not understand you. "It feels that way, sometimes. The more I try to extricate myself from your clutches, the more deeply entangled in you I become. I am loath to ask you for anything, because then I will only be all the more indebted to you."

  "You owe me both everything and nothing." You gaze down at the scotch and do not explain that statement any further.

  I wait. Finally, I must break the silence. "That does not make any sense, Caleb."

  "It does, if you think about it. I created you in a sense, as we have both stated before. I was there when you woke up. I was there when you relearned how to walk and talk. I was there when you chose your name. I am woven into the fabric of your very personality. So yes, you owe me. But then again, you are a person, not a robot, not an object to be owned or made. So you owe me nothing. Some days I feel one way, some days the other." You take another sip, still not looking at me.

  "I want the chip out, Caleb." I say.

  You touch and swipe at the screen of your phone several times in quick succession, and then hold it to your ear. "Good morning, Dr. Frankel. I am well, and yourself? Good, good. I'm calling to see how soon you can be in New York. That facial reconstruction you did six years ago? The young woman? I would like you to reverse a certain element of that procedure. I'm sure you're aware what I mean. Correct . . . I think ten million dollars is a little high, Doctor. How about two? Eight? I think not. It's a very simple procedure, Doctor. It will take you twenty minutes at most. Fine, three, and I'll arrange a night out with one of the girls to an exclusive club I know of. Very good. Tomorrow then. I'll have Len meet you with the car at ten A.M. Eastern time, domestic arrivals at LaGuardia. Excellent. Thank you for your time, Dr. Frankel." You end the call with a touch of your index finger, set the phone on the arm of your chair, and glance at me. "There. By noon tomorrow, the chip will be gone."

  Silence between us then, equal parts awkward and comfortable.

  After a time I cannot measure, you stand up, drain the glass, set it on the table. "I have much yet to do today. So if there is nothing else, I need a shower. You are, of course, welcome to stay as long as you wish."

  It cannot be that simple. That easy. There is so much I want to say, but I don't know how. Nothing fits. None of the puzzle pieces click properly. I feel panic at the sight of you walking away so easily.

  "Wait." I stand. Take careful steps across the thick rug and halt behind you, mere inches from the rippling plateau of muscle that is your back. Watch you breathe. Watch your shoulders rise gently and fall subtly with each breath. "Tell me the story, Caleb. How you found me."

  "I thought you'd be past that by now." You do not turn around. Your hands clench into fists.

  Early-morning sun blazes through the eastward-facing windows, bathing us in brilliant yellow light. Dust motes dance in the gleaming spears of sunshine.

  "I'll never be past that, Caleb. I need to hear it." What I do not say, a truth I do not dare utter, is that I doubt you.

  I doubt the truth of the story. I wonder if, perhaps, it is just that: a story. A fiction you fabricated in order to bind me to you. But I have to hear it, one more time.

  As Isabel.

  You move with slow, lithe steps to a window. Rest a forearm against the frame, and your forehead against your arm. "It was late. Past midnight, I believe. It was raining, and had been for hours. The whole world was wet."

  A flash of olfactory memory hits me: wetness, damp concrete, the smell of rain. I choke on the remembered scent.

  "The sidewalks glistened in the streetlights," you continue, "and I have this very specific memory of the way the stoplights looked on the wet pavement of the road, red circles, yellow circles, green circles. I remember the way my shoes sounded, clicking dully on the pavement. I was alone on the sidewalk, which is rare in New York, even at midnight. But it was October, so the rain was cold, and it was windy. The kind of weather you didn't go out in unless you had to. The wind was so strong it would turn your umbrella inside out. It had done it to mine, and I'd stuffed it into a trash can. I was so wet. I'd been walking for blocks in the pouring rain. Funny thing is, I don't remember why I was out. Where I was going, where I was coming from, or why. I was absentminded. Just trying to get home as quickly as possible. I would have walked right past you. I almost did. I don't help the homeless as a rule. Not because I am too important, or because I'm too cheap, or any of that. But because I know from experience any help I give them will only go to more drugs, more alcohol, more gambling. I cannot help everyone in the city. When I first began making real money, I tried. I think everyone who f
irst moves to New York tries to help the beggars. It's a rite of passage to becoming a New Yorker, I think. Eventually, you have to learn that you cannot spend all your money tipping the homeless. Especially when many of them aren't really even homeless, but merely too lazy to work. I know this, as well, from personal experience. I know their addictions. I know their predilection for destructive substances."

  "You're wandering off topic, Caleb," I say.

  You sigh. Make a fist and tap your knuckles against the glass in a rhythmic pattern: tap-tap--taptaptap--tap-tap--taptaptap. You are still staring out the window, head cradled against your forearm.

  "Indeed I am."

  You lapse into silence, into stillness.

  When you speak again, your voice is slow and cadenced. "You were lying on the sidewalk, facedown. Wearing that blue dress. Curled up in a ball, in the rain. Just lying there, so still. I walked past you, and then something made me stop, I still don't know what. I turned around. Looked at you. Really saw you. I've walked past a thousand homeless men and women and not really seen them. But I saw you. I saw your hair, thick and black and so long. Wet and matted and sticky with blood. I saw that. The blood. Maybe that's what stopped me. You were bleeding. Not homeless, but hurt. Curled up, but you were trying to move. Trying to crawl. I turned back, and you reached out a hand, tried to drag yourself across the sidewalk. Your fingernails had been ripped off from dragging yourself like that for who knows how long. Your fingers were shredded. Your toes, too. Bloody from crawling across the ground, bleeding. Alone. Cold and wet. Dying."

  You pause, and I see us in the reflection. Your face in profile, high cheekbones, square jaw, brownbrownbrown eyes like fragments of deepest space, black hair swept back and damp with sweat, a single strand curling on your forehead as if placed there by an artist. My profile is very similar: dark skin, olive-caramel, black eyebrows, black hair. Exotic features, wide, almond-shaped eyes darker even than yours, not truly black, which is biologically impossible, but so fiercely darkly brown as to appear so except under direct illumination. The sun is in my eyes now, so the brown is almost visible. My hair is braided, the queue hanging over my right shoulder onto the dove-gray fabric of my dress.

  You breathe in, continue. "You looked at me. 'Ayudame,' you said. 'Ayudame.'"

  A bolt of something hot and sharp and hard and excruciating hits me. "'Help me.'"

  I slump forward against the window, leaning against it beside you.

  You look at me in our reflection, surprise on your features. "You remember?"

  I shake my head. "No. No more than ever, just faint impressions, like a memory of a dream. Some things are more . . . visceral, like the smell of rain. The smell of wet concrete. But I just . . . know . . . what that word means."

  "Que utilizas para hablar espanol, creo," you say.

  You used to speak Spanish, I think.

  "Si lo hice," I respond, surprising myself. "Aun lo hago, parece."

  Yes, I did. I still do, it seems.

  "I don't know why it never occurred to me to try speaking to you in Spanish," you say.

  "Strange, indeed."

  You eye me directly then, perhaps catching the sarcasm in my tone. It was faint, but present. "You looked so . . . pitiful. Helpless. I picked you up. You were speaking, but it was too faint and too rapid for me to catch it. Something about your parents, I remember. Spanish is one of my weaker languages, and you were mumbling, and your accent was odd. Proper Spanish, I think, from Spain. Different from the Spanish spoken by Mexicans and other Latin Americans, which is the Spanish I know."

  "How many languages do you speak?" I ask, curious.

  "Five. I know some French, but not enough to be fluent, practically speaking. English, Czech, German, Spanish, and Mandarin. I'm strongest in German and Mandarin, my Czech is old and I don't speak it much anymore, and obviously English is my primary language now."

  Now? What does that mean? I open my mouth to ask, but you speak over me, as if you realize that you've given something away, engendered more questions.

  "You clung to me when I picked you up. More strongly than I'd thought you capable of. Begged me to go back, go back. I caught that much. But I couldn't figure out why. I asked you what was back there, and you became frantic. Incoherent. Screaming, thrashing. You were bleeding all over me, and I knew I had to get you to a hospital soon or you'd die. I have many skills, but dealing with injuries is not one of them. So I held on to you and carried you to the nearest hospital, which happened to be just a couple blocks away. It was where you were going, I think. Or trying to. You wouldn't have gotten there. Not in the shape you were in. As it was, the surgeons say you barely made it. You'd been bleeding profusely for a long time." You pause, and your eyes go vacant, unfocused, staring into memory. Something tells me you are telling me the truth. At least part of it. "I'll never forget it. That night. Holding you in my arms. You were so frail, so slight. So young. Only sixteen, I think. Or thereabouts. Sixteen, seventeen. A girl, still. But so beautiful already. Dying, terrified, lost, and your eyes, when I set you down on the stretcher when we got to the ER, you looked up at me with those great big black eyes of yours and I just . . . I couldn't walk away. Something in your eyes just caught me. You needed me. You clung to my hand and you wouldn't let go. I followed the medics as they wheeled the stretcher through the halls of the ER, to the operating room. They wouldn't let me back there with you. I think they thought I was your boyfriend or husband, which was the only reason they'd let me get that far. I remember so vividly the last moment I saw you. You were twisted on the stretcher, trying to see me. Desperate for me. It was like I knew you. Like you knew me. I'd never seen you before, never met you. But I just . . . I did know you. I don't know. It doesn't make any sense. But I couldn't leave. I couldn't. I walked out of the hospital, but it was like there was this . . . this rope tied around me, and you were pulling on it, pulling me back in. So I waited in the ER waiting room for the next six hours as they worked on you."

  I believe this. I also believe you are lying about something. Not this, but something. Maybe lying by omission. I don't know. I don't dare ask. This is the most detail you've ever given me out of the thousands of times you've told me this story. I need this. Need it. I let you speak. Lean against the glass in silence as you talk. I feel as if I've been listening for a thousand years now. Logan, and now you. Hours of listening. I'm so tired, so exhausted, but I cannot turn away. Cannot turn a deaf ear to this, not when it contains truth you've kept so long hidden.

  "They'd shaved your head." You glance behind, at your phone on the arm of the chair. Retrieve it.

  I watch as you swipe across the screen, press your thumb to the circular button, and a plain black background appears. No, not black. Stars. Speckles of silver, a constellation. Which one, I don't know, can't tell. You tap on a white icon with a multicolored rosette, like a flower made of all primary colors in an overlapping wheel. Photos appear. You tap a button near the top, and the photo icons get smaller, multiply, arrange themselves by year. You scroll down so the photos move backward in time. I catch your face, a car, snow, a painting, me, me, me, in states of undress, asleep, not looking at you, clasping my bra behind my back, head turned in profile. So many photos of me. None of Rachel, none of Four or Six or anyone else. Just me. Tiny little squares of color like a mosaic, a composition of me. You scroll down, down, down through the years. To 2006--not 2009. You touch the row of photos so fast I almost doubt what I saw, and they expand, organized now by location, some from New Jersey, most from various boroughs of New York City. More scrolling through the photos from that year, until you find one. The one. Me, again. So young. My god, so young.

  I barely recognize myself. My face is battered. Scratches. Cuts. Bruises. So thin. Delicate-looking, birdlike frailty. My head is shaved down to black stubble, highlighting the contours of my skull and the high sharpness of my cheekbones and the almond-shaped width of my eyes. There is a bright, wicked, reddish-pink scar on my scalp, on the left side, crossed
by jagged black threads. I am looking at you. At the camera, the phone. Not smiling, just staring. Wide eyed and curious.

  I do not remember this. But I am staring at you. I am lying in a bed. The frame of the photograph contains a bit of silver rail, pillow, some blue fabric, probably the hospital gown. How can you have taken this photograph of me, looking so fresh, so candid?

  "You came out of the initial surgery just fine. Woke up after, everything seemed fine. I snapped this. You remembered me. We didn't really talk, just sat together. Then the nurses kicked me out, saying you needed to sleep. And when I came back the next day, you were gone. They said something had gone wrong during the night. Swelling in your brain. They had to do emergency surgery, put you in a medically induced coma. You didn't wake up from it for six months."

  I take the phone from you and stare at myself. The younger me. As if I could find clues to my past, to my former self in this digital photograph, nothing but pixels, nothing but ones and zeroes. I cannot. I do not see myself in this. I see a girl, a sixteen-year-old girl. Lost and alone, trying to be defiant. Staring up at a camera held by the man who'd saved me, unhappy but daring. Brave, but scared. I see this. Did I know then that my parents were dead? Did I even have a chance to mourn? Or did the bleeding in my brain steal that from me as well?

  I cannot get over the way I appear in the photo. My head shaved, how it highlights my eyes and cheekbones, the delicate but somehow strong shape of my head. I look a little masculine, but I am yet somehow unmistakably female. Involuntarily, I run my hand over the top of my head, almost expecting to feel stubble.

  Could I?

  What would it feel like? To feel nothing but scratchy stubble and scalp? No hair, no long thick black tresses.

  I could do it. Perhaps I will.

  Perhaps to truly become Isabel, I must shave my head and regrow my hair once more. Cut away the coiffured, styled, curled, brushed, perfect locks of Madame X and become Isabel, a new woman, rebirthed and fresh and raw.

  You turn in place. Take your phone back, shut it off, toss it aside carelessly. It lands on the seat of the armchair and bounces once. You are looking down at me. You take my braid in your hand, tug my head back. You are standing close, not quite touching. Towering over me. Blocking out all the world with your muscled bulk, and I smell you. Feel your heat.